Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep. - - - - |
Occasionally, Happy Baby author Stephen Elliott hosts a poker game at his house. After the game, he writes a report of the evening, which is then e-mailed out to a list of subscribers. If you would like to subscribe, you can do so by sending an e-mail to pokerreport-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. - - - - Looking Forward to It - - - - November 16, 2007 1. It's been a long time since I've written a poker report, or been in Vegas, or looked into the cold eyes of a murderer, wondering what he told himself as he tried to sleep in his windowless cell at night, but that's the kind of week it's been. It's the middle of November and I'm on Virgin America, flying back from Las Vegas to San Francisco, where, on the other side of the bay, Hans Reiser stands trial for the murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, whose body was never found. I read recently that people are only really interested in sex and murder. And people aren't as interested in sex as we think they are. I think it was Dominick Dunne who said that. Dominick's become a murder junkie, mainlining the Menendez brothers and Claus von Bülow's fatal charm, assessing the cut of O.J.'s suit. He can't get enough. Nonetheless, I left the Reiser trial, where the famous computer programmer's son was being mercilessly cross-examined by the talented defense attorney William Du Bois. The child was 6 years old when his father did or didn't kill his mother. He's 8 now, and is as handsome as his mother was beautiful. Pursuant to international treaties, he was flown in from Russia, where he'd been staying with his maternal grandmother. In Las Vegas, I met a longtime girlfriend who was there on business with a free room at the Bellagio on the 21st floor, and a view of the city consuming the desert like termites on a block of wood. We have the type of relationship open to people who don't get married, or have children, and are willing to live as long as possible slightly unmoored. There was room service, then dancing, and then, while she slept, I crept down to the poker room. It was 6 in the morning. I said, "Deal me in." 2. One-Dollar/Two-Dollar No Limit was the only game available. There was a drunken Jew at the table, and a German. The Jew said, "I'm a Jew. But I don't hate you because you're German. That was a long time ago." The German said he appreciated that. A flop came with a pair of tens and the Jew wrapped his knuckles on the felt and the German pushed $40 over the line. In No Limit you can bet as much as you have, and the Jew had stacks to his eyeballs. I only call him the Jew because that's what he called himself. I'm half-Jewish, but I never refer to myself as "the half-Jew." I usually introduce myself as Steve. But that's not what happened. What happened was it was early in the morning and normal people were sleeping. The Jew was drunk, but playing very well and talking strange. People bet heavily against him because he made such a scene, but he won every time, or folded when it was the right thing to do. He wore a nice suit and had a big head of hair. He swung his giant stack of chips like Chris Cooney swings a hammer: hard, and with precision. The Jew came over the top toward the German, pushing $80, and then, on the turn, which is another way of saying the fourth card, because in Hold'em there are five cards with the first three coming on the flop, then the turn, then the river. And soon he was all in, though not really. He was all in for the German's money, but if he lost he would still have money to spare. He had been winning all night. The German lost that hand, even though he was drinking seltzer and the other man drank whiskey. The Jew said he would buy drinks for the table, which was totally unnecessary since the drinks were free. He tipped the dealer $10 for the 10/ace in the hole. He called the cocktail waitress. He said, "I always tip you, right? Don't I always tip?" I wanted to say, "Why do you call yourself 'the Jew'? Don't you know I'm going to write about this?" Of course, he didn't know. It's something I've been wrestling with recently, the difficulty of being decent to my subjects while still being honest with the reader, and where exactly is that moral line? On Sunday, when we're watching football, there's an orange line showing the first down, and all the players have to do is get across that line they can't see. Life's more complicated than that. The Internet has made people very sensitive with being written about. The Jew said, "I'm just having a good time." I liked him quite a bit. The table was open like a flower and as loose as a hubcap without lugs. It cost $2 to see a hand, provided nobody dropped a pre-raise. I played everything, four ten, five jack suited. I lost $5, $10. But when I won, I won big. I never bet. I took my free cards. When I made a hand, I doubled or tripled whatever came back to me. I didn't worry about pot odds. I played the players. It was early. An orange sun had risen. A beautiful woman was breathing softly into her pillow on the 21st floor. The Jew was telling jokes. The slot machines were almost musical. I was patient and I was winning hundreds of dollars. "I'm Asian," the guy next to me said. "I'm supposed to do better than this." By that time the German was long gone and I realized that poker says a lot about how we process ethnicity. At some point I felt compelled to tell someone I was born in England. My biggest loss came with an ace/king of spades in the hole. Two spades came on the flop. Another player raised and I raised back for $70. I was looking for a payday. The turn came: a heart. Now there were two spades and two hearts. If another spade came, I would have the nuts. My opponent went all in. He had a stack and I had a stack. It would cost $400 to see it. If it was a spade, I won. But the odds were less than 25 percent. If it was an ace or a king of diamonds or clubs, I was in good shape, but it wasn't guaranteed. My chances were less than 50 percent, but there was already $100 in the pot. I didn't like it. I tossed big king into the muck. When I told my girl I had won $300, she took $100 from me. She didn't even think about it. It was fair enough, in a way. She was an escort and lived in Washington, D.C., but that's not why. She'd come out to Vegas for the week with two scientists who were best friends and split their days with her. They paid for the room, and the room service. She was a friend of the girl I saw sometimes in San Francisco, who would also want $100. It's the price of winning. Relationships always take off the top. Just like the house. The house pulls a rake from every hand played. When you lose money, they never give it back. After lunch, she went back to work and I went back to the tables. In the afternoon, the players were well rested; the tables had tightened up. There was a debate happening that night at UNLV but nobody cared. We talked about Barry Bonds looking at perjury charges. "It's such a dumb crime," someone said, probably me. "You never need to lie to a grand jury." Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates were refocusing on Hillary Clinton, who, a few months ago, said that she would continue to accept money from lobbyists. "A lot of these lobbyists represent real Americans," she said. "They represent nurses, social workers, and, yes, they represent corporations and they employ a lot of people." With the front-runner talking like that, it's no wonder people are sitting out. The point is, I tightened up as well, and I was as interested in the debate as everybody else. I waited. I didn't check the flop. I played the cards. And then I noticed the kid three from the dealer. His black hair spiked and nervous, he looked about my age when I had my first major poker loss. That was a devastating moment and, at the time, I wasn't sure I would ever recover. I took him for $50, then I folded a winning hand against him and he threw his cards face up on the table with a sharp laugh. "It's about time that worked!" It was uncalled for. He was rubbing my face in it. But I didn't feel angry. I felt calm. This kid was going to lose it all today. He was going to lose it to me, or someone else. An hour later, we went back and forth on a hand until he pushed all his chips into the middle, a stack of 30 red. I asked for time and I looked at him. He was biting his lip, glaring at me, looking down. I had a paired ace on the board. I had more money than he had. He didn't have the confidence. All I had was high pair, but he had nothing. So I called and the river came and he faced his cards and stood to leave while I organized what he used to have. 3. That was yesterday. I'm on a plane back toward the Bay. Reiser's trial will take at least two more months, probably three. In the airport, I see Snoop Dogg, wearing silver track pants and an oversized sweatshirt with the hood pulled forward covering a pair of giant headphones. He was traveling with two of the biggest men I've ever seen. I watched him go to Mrs. Fields and buy cookies with a hundred-dollar bill. He smiled at the woman behind the counter as she counted out his change, and I stood to the side, pretending to consider the hot dogs. Last night, I wondered if that kid at the Bellagio could afford to lose. Someone said, after he left, that he couldn't afford not to lose. I doubted that. But, then, not everything always adds up. Who pays for cookies with a hundred-dollar bill? Stephen Elliott - - - - July 18, 2007 Guest Writer—Steve Almond It was Baudelaire who famously warned us: "Nobody wants to see a clown at midnight." To which we may now add the less famous corollary: "Nobody wants to see Stephen Elliott across the poker table at any time of the day or night." Elliott, a shameless raconteur of sexual shame (well, all right, who isn't?), appears docile and often slightly disoriented when not seated behind a stack of chips. His affect at the table de poke changes. Gone is the lovable masochist who insists on trauma play as his chief form of recreation, replaced by a wolf with a sheep-eating grin. But I am getting ahead of myself. To set the scene. We are in Pornland, Organ, the only city in America with a mandatory-tattoo policy. More specifically, we are in a large, bug-infested dormitory on the Reed College campus, where the still-coherent staff of the Tin House Writer's Workshop has gathered for a late-night round of Hold 'Em, organized by Monsignor Elliott himself. Around the table (from my left) are the following personages: Aimee Bender The buy-in is $20, nearly half the annual salary for most of these working writers. We settle on a one-dollar/two-dollar game, so as to prolong the agony for the lesser players. The Monsignor immediately takes out the long knives, putting together a three-hand run that culminates in a house full of kings and knaves. Blood appears on his incisors, and his studded choker miraculously dissolves. The game is briefly derailed by Aimee Bender's effort to buy in using candy wrappers. While the Monsignor impugns her reputation, the phalanx of railbirds seated on a nearby chifforobe leaps to her defense, led by the irascible Jim Shepard, who is dressed (nonsensically) in a pleather crop top. There is no bargaining with Shepard. He has published nine books and we must live with his fashion decisions. The action turns ugly for young Cheston Knapp, who tosses his chips into the pot with the exuberance of a child dispensing pellets at the petting zoo. Within an hour the baby goats are starving. The Monsignor generously offers to restock him, and extends the same financing to Whitehead, then displays the two twenties he has just taken from his comrades in plain view of the entire table. And they say humility is dead. Whitehead, representing the East Coast and playing loose enough to be accused of sluttery, comes roaring back in hour two. The youthful master of speculative fiction stuns the Monsignor with a hand that features no fewer than five sevens. He then takes Goldfaden to the cleaners on what has to be considered the hand of the night. It proceeds like so: Whitehead nabs a four of spades on the flop, giving him a pair. Then, on the river—staring a high pair in the kisser—he draws another four of spades. Trips to win. The railbirds go silent with awe. The Monsignor begins suckling his nipple ring. This, my friends, is how you nab a MacArthur grant. Goldfaden, to his credit, refuses to back down. Three times he goes all in against the heavy action. Each time, he pulls the necessary cards out of his anus, thus earning his handle. Meanwhile, Bender is cycling through her cash like a playgirl in heat. The cheat sheet she clings is hardly inspiring confidence. Sure enough, she runs through her last ten-spot challenging Chesty Morgan and the Monsignor on the biggest pot of the night. The Monsignor shows two pair. Chesty turns over a seven, to match the pair on the board. The railbirds groan. Bender shrugs and shows the boys a pair of ladies in the hole, making three in all. Ballgame. Thanks for playing, Chesty. We are playing with three decks, one of which features George W. Bush in a variety of costumes. Bush as a fairy princess. Bush as a bonobo. It is sad to see the sitting president reduced to a novelty gag, nearly as sad as the Monsignor's wardrobe, which has been provided—as he informs us bashfully—by Nike, whose co-founder and former CEO, Phil Knight, is a fan. I believe my favorite item of clothing is the sleeveless mesh T-shirt, which allows for a clear viewing of the Monsignor's guns. That or his backpack with leather cell-phone holder. Very street. Things turn sloppy in the third hour of the game. Spillman, a dominant force in the early going, finds himself battling Whitehead in a series of pots only a mother could love. Jacks over nines. Eights over sixes. Ace high beats a queen bluff. Faced with this onslaught of mediocrity, the railbirds fall asleep, one by one. Bender hits the rack, mumbling something about a gentleman with playing cards where his hands used to be. The Brink bids adieu on a minor flush. El Tigre watches his life savings dissolve to the nut straight, held by yours truly. The game is down to seven, then six, then five. Soon, the only seats left are the Monsignor, Whitehead, Spillman, and myself. The games take on a certain grim momentum. Everyone has shit cards. The action is something like cutting for high card, only not that compelling. We are passing chips back and forth, very slowly. Testosterone and a reasonable fear of poverty are the only things keeping us awake. Finally, the Monsignor himself cashes in, claiming he needs his beauty sleep. Nobody disagrees. In a move that exemplifies the class of his particular operation, the Monsignor notes loudly that he's up $42, and signals for me to include this in my notes. (I am not taking notes.) It is hard to overstate the plain human misery incurred by this single poker game. The play itself has been listless. The company dull beyond words. I have come to see just how poor the quality of patter becomes when writers try to do more than one thing at once. And yet I am also strangely moved by the sight of the Monsignor, stumbling off to bed in his mesh T-shirt, with his winnings stuffed deep in his pockets. If this man can honestly fleece a small portion of the earth's population for an entire misspent evening, there is hope for us yet. Steve Almond - - - - June 9, 2007 Class Warfare in Tinseltown It was the day Paris Hilton went back to jail and it was just in time. My ex-girlfriend had called me earlier to make sure I knew she would never sleep with me again under any circumstances. It seemed gratuitous to me; why did we have to have this conversation? It was so sunny outside. "Maybe a hug, if we happen to run into each other on the street. But that's it." It was one of the most depressing phone calls I've ever had. It seemed to me we should sleep together one last time, just to be sure. Anyway, a catastrophe had been temporarily averted. Since Paris Hilton's release, people had been stashing bricks, preparing to storm Pacific Heights. The windows of the rich, peering across the Golden Gate Bridge, were ripe for breaking. But then Judge Sauer applied a warm compress to the mounting rage. There would be other opportunities for the poor to mass in the street. There was a war going on, after all. Still, I was angry. No one should be sentenced to a lifetime of sleeping alone. Sheriff Lee Baca had a lot of explaining to do. What was Paris Hilton's strange illness? Anyway, it wasn't so much that they'd let Paris out; it was that they'd kept everybody else in. For one shining moment I imagined every drunk behind bars in Southern California exiled to mansions pocking the Hollywood skyline, staring down at all the sober losers clogging the 101 on the way to work. Forty days of in-home spas and catered meals. Parties and pills and anorexia and rock-and-roll in the backyard. Then back to the grind. Or not. You can actually live a long time on very little if you're careful not to have a family. There's more than one American Dream. What You Find in the Grove All the talk about Hollywood heiresses and $3,000 handbags is just to set the mood for our first-ever Friday-night poker game. Ben came early with chorizo burritos from Farralito on 24th. Wendy's out of town for the weekend, so Ben is on a mission to digest as much red meat and cholesterol as he can before she returns. He was with his brother Andrew, who wore a brace. They were followed by Windy, Eric, Isaac, Michelle Richmond, Cooney, and Eli. Windy and Michelle looked like movie stars and the obvious question was what they were doing in a shabby apartment with a dull-gray carpet off Prospect Street on a weekend night. But nobody wanted to ask. We played variants of Hold'em but quickly moved into Peach Grove. Cooney bet big on double barrel, four in the hole, two rows of cards across the middle, then two more to share. There were often four cards down. Often two and only two. There was California Peach Grove and San Francisco Peach Grove. There was even talk of Peach Grove 11th And Folsom, the only card game with a wraparound, the highest combination a suited king, ace, two. But it didn't happen. What did happen was that Isaac called Windy a bitch. Then he apologized. He was trying to live up to the ghost of Andy Miller. But Miller was a meth addict and Isaac was just drunk. Isaac lost everything, including bus fare, finally paying $7.25 on a $10 wager and hanging his head in shame. Windy offered to take care of him for a while in exchange for housecleaning duties and Isaac cried like a child in her lap. This is all true. Otherwise Michelle played carefully but still lost $20. Cooney played scared like a man with a broken-down tractor signing away the family farm. I lost $16. I don't remember much else. Except there was a new version of Peach Grove: French Grove. In French Grove you play two and only two in your five-card hand, then three on five cards on the table. The French also invented a game called euchre, which goes a long way toward explaining why they haven't won a war since Napoleon. Patti Smith When it was over I threw away the Indian pizza box and mopped the spilled tequila in the kitchen. It was 11:30 and Bernal Heights was quiet, so I went to a drag bar on Polk Street for Patti Smith Night. The bar had colorful flags on the walls and sloping hardwood floors. It was the kind of place where people are easy with their hands and if you let them they'll take things they haven't paid for yet. I didn't care. It was a free-market economy. I was down nearly $16 on the night. Michelle had lost $20 and she had a husband and a child. Her gambling was irresponsible. I was writing on the back of a study on Internet addiction commissioned by Stanford University. Bonnie was there, dressed like a cheerleader, and I rested my head in her lap for a while on the bench out back where you can smoke. When she went down to change for her show, a boy in a cute mohawk asked me what I was writing. I told him I didn't know. I could have said in California Grove it's trips or better for a high and in Iowa you roll four cards one at a time. I could have explained the importance of our poker games and how it kept us young and our community vibrant. How we had been playing regularly for six years now. How we had started with dime-ante Hold'em and now we played quarter-ante Grove. But I didn't. He told me he was a poet and that he did "boy burlesque." He was pretty, but if I were gay he wouldn't be my type. I'd want someone strong, with a good job, a nice clean apartment, and a big bed. Someone I could be faithful to. The daddy type. But, then, who knows? Patti Smith was telling us Jesus didn't die for her sins. Bonnie was on the stage with pompoms. Patti was singing and a drag queen was peeing on her abusive boyfriend and pretending to slit his throat. It was all very San Francisco. The rest of the country was staring at their ceilings, mouths agape, wondering what would happen to Tony Soprano on Sunday. I was, too, but I didn't let any of the queers know it. Bonnie was luminous in her pleated white skirt, kicking her legs high. She was just turning 24. I watched the queens in their makeup, wigs, and leather pants. I wondered why I had never been a drag queen. But then I'm twitchy. There would be lipstick everywhere. It would be hours and hours before the night was over. I'm not sure if I made it back to even. But that's not really the point. In poker, as in life, there are winners and losers. And just because you stay at the table, that's no guarantee you'll come out ahead. But only the rich and the dead don't bother to try. Stephen Elliott - - - - March 19, 2007 It was Thursday and I was just back from touring the country with the Sex Workers' Art Show. We had been to 31 cities in 35 days. We had caused a scandal at William and Mary, where they had just removed a cross from the chapel before inviting a group of hookers and strippers in to perform for 500 screaming children. I was sick at William and Mary and lay backstage with a jacket over my head until it was time for me to perform. But that's beside the point. The point is I was back in San Francisco where I belong. In San Francisco, where everyone is a sex worker, where every marriage is polyamorous, where men are usually women, and the women wear strap-ons beneath their long, flowing skirts. Back in San Francisco, where sex and sexuality is so guilt-free, liberal, and without pretension that it is boring. It's where we play poker. It was a large game. Ben brought Dave, Dave, and Tono, his Colorado friends. Then there was Erin and her sushi chef, Chris "Write That Down!" Cooney. And Isaac, Anna, Donahue, and, finally, Eli, the renowned editor, stumbling in late and ready to play. There were 12 of us at the table, counting the sushi chef. The game of the night was Iowa Peach Grove, four in the middle and four down. In Iowa you need trips or better to win a high and nothing higher than a seven to go low. Isaac was drunk as usual and sporting a thick beard but seemed to win every hand. In one brutal turn of events he laid down ace through four, catching the five on the river with $30 in the pot, nearly wiping me clean. Donahue lost everything as usual, or half of everything, or maybe just a couple of dollars. I gave all the guys golf balls and gave out sports bras for the women. I found a few boxes of Nike stuff recently, and I've been giving it away. We played Hold'em and Dave or Dave lost with kings in the hole. I had a bottle of single-malt, left by the guy who sublet my place while I was touring the country for a month with two vans full of hookers, and we all drank from that. Ben was particularly drunk and he started talking about what a good time he was having while his girlfriend was out of town. How he and Tono and Dave and Dave would wear bedsheets like togas and cook giant piles of sausage while watching basketball on the big-screen TV and doing ritual dances in the living room and pouring beer all over each other and beating their chests and proclaiming their undying man-love for one another. "You better clean it up before Wendy gets home," I told him. "She'll never know," Ben replied, drinking another shot from his Starbucks cup.* There was also Scrotum and then the sushi chef left and we played California Peach Grove and then San Francisco Peach Grove. "I have brought this game Peach Grove from the prairies of the great Midwest, an area once covered beneath a giant lake and now flooded with ears of corn. And I have delivered this game onto the dry shores of the California coast, " Cooney said. "Write that down." There were more cards and money to go around and my luck was changing quickly as it got later. Also, I got my poker table back from Windy. She re-felted it so it no longer reads "Steve's House O' Poker, Suckers Welcome." Still, it had weight and drink holders and it felt like we were back again in the best of old times. Somehow, nothing happened to my furniture. (I had made Ben leave a deposit—his Colorado friends are known thugs, animals full of violence, prone to howling at the moon.) Somehow, we were able to find truth in this glorious mass of humanity, the second-largest poker-night turnout ever, a peace that rarely arises between nations save when confronted with a common enemy such as pirates, starvation, or disease. Somehow, Tono won $50. Somehow, I was ahead $5 before the chips were put away, and poor Anna, who runs a store that raises money for charity, lost her last $20 in the whole world. I told her she was welcome to take some macaroni and cheese home with her so she would have something to eat tomorrow, but all the macaroni was gone by then. (I had made the macaroni in a baking pan using fontina, Parmesan, and ricotta and covering the top with matzo meal in place of bread crumbs.) Somehow, it all ended nicely as the night and the cards faded into a pleasant morning, a tiny hangover hovering in the back of my temples, reminding me gently of what passed the night before. Stephen Elliott * Each Starbucks cup has a number on the side of it accompanied with a quote from a famous author. The particular cup Ben was drinking from was number 180. - - - - January 19, 2007 The Road Home Before anyone arrives I make a stir-fry of all the vegetables left in the house. Three potatoes, four carrots, half a bunch of spinach. I use cayenne, mushroom base, the center stalks of some very old green onions. I make eight servings of rice in the cooker. It's still cold in San Francisco, I'm out of beer, the Chinese have just shot down a satellite, and no one is really sure what's going to happen tonight. Meanwhile, Jory and Joel, both new to poker night, are down the street negotiating for a hostile takeover of a 12-pack with the angry liquor-store owner on Cortland. Isaac is flying across the hills on a bicycle as high as his knees. Ben, Cooney, and Ben's young, impressionable brother, Andrew, are motoring Noe Valley at high speeds, brown bags on their laps, Cooney driving the station wagon as if it were a Camaro, as if it were 1986 and there were no doors and there were nothing to look forward to except a handful of good times and a long stint in jail. John Stassen is taking his sweet time, kept company by a six of Corona. Meanwhile, Bob Ney, the former congressman, gets 30 months in prison, the longest yet for anyone associated with Jack Abramoff. Lewis Libby is going to trial for lying. Thirty-four thousand Iraqis were killed last year, none of them wearing uniforms. Pelosi is wearing well-cut skirts and pushing for ethics reform. And I'm leaving. This will be the last game before I hit the road for more than a month with the Sex Worker Art Show tour. Putting It All Together We start with Texas Hold'em, standard, two down, five across the middle. There are four school teachers at the table tonight. There are several people that have never played poker before. My roommate Jory is playing for the first time and he has a gambling problem: you can see it in his spinning eyes. The first big hand is Cooney vs. Ben. They're playing Iowa Peach Grove, which is the traditional game, four down, four across the middle flipped one at a time. Cooney keeps raising a dollar and Ben stays with him the entire time. In Peach Grove, unless you're playing San Francisco Grove, where anything goes, you need seven and under or trips to qualify. When Cooney turns his hand he doesn't qualify and Ben sweeps the pot with a small straight. "I thought you'd fold," Chris says. "Would it hurt to respect my position once in a while?" Nobody ever folds against Cooney. "You got to lose big to win big," he says. Later, Cooney will yell, "Write it down! I bluffed with a pair of nines showing on Texas Hold'em!" Later, we will have the first-ever 50-cent misdeal when Ben Peterson forgets the "man hand" in San Francsico Peach Grove. Later, Ben will try to get his 50 cents back by putting two quarters in the pot and calling it a buck. "The hay's not in the barn yet," Cooney says to Andrew during 7-card low. There have been a lot of complaints recently about accuracy in the poker report. I decide to open it up to the participants to set the record straight. Here's what Isaac remembers of the night: Walking out the door with $30. Having a big pile and watching it dwindle only to win most of it back with three kings. Three big wins that showed up on the final flopped card (walking on the river or something). Finally feeling like I grasp Peach Grove. Joel winning big, then losing it in seven minutes. Jory staying alive with a 25-cent all-in. The precedent being set on 50-cent fuck-up tax. Picking at the stir-fry after declining on the offer of a plate. A lot of beer. A lot of sports talk. Everyone being called "teach." End result: Here's what John Stassen remembers of the night: I fell under Cooney's spell last night. His mantra of "NICE!" followed by "I like it ... aggressive" after every stupid bet only encouraged me and made me lose all my chips. Peterson was as sneaky as ever. Cooney kept hollering for low games. I lost a majority of my chips on a low Peach Grove bid, with an ace, two, four, five, seven. Somebody, I think it was Isaac, had a three. Peterson was nice enough to explain it to me. It's always good to know why you just got hosed. Joel, I think that's his name, knew apparently nothing about cards. It was unclear if he had even seen a deck before, and he still beat me. The stir-fry was tasty. There was a lot of talk of the Vatican Council of Cards. Cooney upped the ante for a misdeal to 50 cents, costing Peterson a quarter. We covered the continental United States in Peace Grove games. We all feared the Man Hand. The dude in the corner(I forget his name) tried to play money and was shot down by the poker gods. End result: When it was all over, Isaac pronounced, "I earned it," then cracked himself a beer. Joel was down $5—respectable for a first-time player and San Francisco hero. He waited for his wife to pick him up. "Really? You play poker all night and she just picks you up?" "I'm a cool guy," Joel said. "And I married an artist." The Morning After In the morning, I wonder if Ben will call again like he did last week while I slept naked early in the morning. Ben won $20 last night, probably the most he's ever won. I wait until 9:30 to put clothes on, then I leave for the office. It's lunchtime when Ben calls. "Are you dressed?" he asks. "Of course," I tell him. "It's afternoon." "I have all this money," he says. "But I feel kind of bad winning it from Cooney." "He can afford it," I say. "He's got a job." "I wish everyone could win," he says. "It feels so good. If everybody was a winner that would be so great." "It's not the way things work," I say. I heard Jory cry last night, his sobs piercing the wall between our rooms. He works with children all day, then he comes home and loses it all. I heard him late at night on the phone to someone far away, wondering aloud how he would pay the rent coming due. You could say he was a victim, but whose victim? He had two pairs in the hole. He thought they would take him all the way. "You don't really think that," I say to Ben. "You're just feeling generous." There's a pause on the other end of the line. "I'm a winner," he says. "For now." "I am," he says. "I am." Stephen Elliott - - - - January 11, 2007 The Speech When Bush started his speech I was already making pasta. It was 5 p.m., January 10, and the Middle East was on fire, bombs across Baghdad like pigeons shitting from telephone poles. The president's face, lined with concern, begging for time. In two more years he'd be out of office and all this mess he'd created would be someone else's to clean up. I cooked up a sauce: half-and-half, Parmesan, Tabasco, four tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of flour. I boiled the noodles, minced some garlic, some coarse pepper, some salt. I mixed it together. Layered the mix in a baking pan I'd bought for $2 at the overpriced grocery on Cortland. The mix, then four cheeses, then the mix, then again. Then matzo meal, more Tabasco, cook at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, make a pan full of perfect macaroni, enough to feed eight. And the whole time I was grating the cheddar, the Gruyère, washing plates, the president was talking about the troop buildup. Streets were shredding like confetti. He wanted 21,000 more soldiers. "We can't afford to lose," he kept saying, "the stakes are too high." But what if we already lost? What if we had already bet more than we could afford? House on a Hill Ben and Cooney arrive on time. The apartment is clean and they've brought beer. They've been warned about the pasta and they want to eat. Then there's do-gooder Chris Thomas, Windy and her dog, Isaac, Poindexter. Donahue is missing. So is Eric Martin, whose wife doesn't want him out with any degenerates until after his next book is published. "Some kind of precautionary measure," he told me in an otherwise incomprehensible e-mail. Eli shows last, unshaven, angry, wearing green and yellow in support of the local baseball team. "You're replaceable," he let's me know, in response to something or other. "Anybody could write 'Stephen Elliott's Poker Report.'" I give him some pasta anyway, to take the edge off whatever has been going on for him. First hand is Hold'em. Chris Thomas plucks a flush on the river. "What did I do to you?" Ben asks. "I just play the cards I'm dealt," Chris replies, which is basically true of Chris. Next, he takes Ben's nines with kings on the turn. Cooney switches it to California Peach Grove and Eli takes it one step further to San Francisco Peach Grove, which is like all the other kinds of Peach Grove except that everything goes. Meanwhile, Poindexter sips bourbon. Windy wins quietly, her stack of black-and-whites framing her features, cards held close against her chest, dog asleep on a pillow on my kitchen floor. If it weren't for Windy, nobody would ever be pretty at this place. Poindexter explains bankruptcy to Eli, who loses his chips early. "You have to use what you have. What do you offer? What does the other guy want? If you don't hold something out, nobody's going to give you anything. Unless you're dealing with friends, which is different." Eli doesn't fair so well in the grove and Isaac loses it all, cards hovering above the table, waiting on a scrotum that never comes, chasing three of a kind with a shared wild card when only four of a kind will do. Earlier, Isaac told us about the new iPhone. He said it was good the screen turned off when you held the phone to your ear, because he had a Treo 650 and he was always hanging up with his dimples. "Look," Isaac says, pointing at his cheeks. "Dimples." "This guy is supposed to replace Andy Miller?" Cooney asks. I shrug my shoulders. It's true we've replaced one of the most hardened criminals in the history of San Francisco with a guy who talks about iPhones and dimples. But Isaac is young. There are crimes he hasn't even thought to commit yet. Plus, he has a drinking problem. He could still go either way. We don't talk about the president's speech. What if he was right? What if we are 21,000 troops away from victory? What would that look like, a victory in Iraq? It would probably look like Saddam was still in power, but we hanged that man, and he told us where to go before he died. The whole time, Chris Thomas and Windy are stacking up. Ben also quietly wins, 50 cents on trips, $2 with four across the board, catching my eye when he can and pointing at his chips. "Winning," he mouths, hoping I'll notice. We play baseball, threes and nines are wild, four buys you a card. Ben is too busy counting his chips and declines to buy a card, which turns out to be wild, and throws his cards on the table in disgust. Windy takes down Cooney with a full house. "I always win when I play with you guys," she says, as if it weren't enough she has a job. Eli goes bankrupt, like his distributor. I feel bad for him, though he did try to make a leveraged buyout on my intellectual property. Cooney cashes out early. "My wife dropped me off," he says, spreading his hand and giving that smile he has. The one that stopped the other kids from kicking his ass when he got caught stealing their toy tractors at middle school in Cedar Rapids. "She went shopping and she's coming back. She making a quilt." That's the kind of guy Cooney is these days. All style but long in the tooth. A married man. After that, things fall apart quickly. Chris has to leave for a meeting, something about saving the world through the power of music. Ben has to get home to Wendy before she notices. Eli's lost everything he has and then some. Windy and Isaac stay a little longer to finish the tequila and the macaroni and then they're gone, too. Ben Bright and Early In the morning, Ben calls at 7 a.m. "I won $11 last night," he says. I squint my eyes, stare out the window. From my window you can see Holly Park, some of the hills on the southern side of the city before the industrial city and the casinos in the graveyard town down the freeway. "That right?" I ask. "You know what time it is?" "You going to write a poker report?" "I don't know." "People think I never win at this game," he says. I feel bad for Ben. I made the macaroni and cheese because he likes it. Otherwise, I would have made Texas chili, but Ben won't eat beans, because of something that happened to him when he was very young. There are ways in which Ben's my favorite person. I have a plaque on my window Ben gave me, a quote from my unpublished novel: "The apartment is a bad work of art"—Victor's Snow. Ben's one of only two people who read that book—the other one broke up with me. Still, it's true Ben doesn't win very often. Though that's not really my fault. I lost $20 early last night before running a grove and a high straight over Eli and Isaac, who split the remaining third of the pot between them. I only came out $6 ahead, not counting a donation from Poindexter. I didn't even win enough to cover the macaroni. "I'll see what I can do," I say. "I don't want you to look bad." "Tell everybody I won the last six times we played," Ben says. It's so early. Somebody's drilling somewhere nearby. They're always building houses in my neighborhood these days. I turn on the stereo, check out some Sly and the Family Stone, There's a Riot Going On. "You know I can't do that," I say, standing naked in my doorway, the construction workers across the street pretending they don't notice. The front page of the paper: "Bush Blows It." "There's loyalty between friends, but there's also the integrity of the report. Some things are bigger than both of us." Stephen Elliott - - - - December 8, 2006 When you don't go online you miss things. You miss Britney Spears flashing the world and the more intricate details of the Iraq Study Group report. You're forced to browse the bookstores; the magazine rack becomes your Internet. Flipping through the articles, gathering data. I haven't been online now for eight days. I pledged to take December off. The upshot is reading David Foster Wallace discuss lobsters and George Packer's discourse on the plight of the Iraqis who have helped the occupation forces and are ripe for slaughter when our forces finally, inevitably, cut and run. It's right there in the pages of The New Republic. The mainstream media, and everybody else, proclaiming we have lost. What now? When you don't have Internet, I realize, you get bored. I haven't been bored in years. Every time I've been bored I've gone online. Now I sit and wait. When you don't have Internet you have to call people to have a poker game. There are those that won't respond. They don't like to talk on the phone. I don't even know who Chris Donahue is anymore. But at 7 o'clock I meet Ben, Cooney, Isaac, and Eli outside of Little Otsu, a stationery store on Valencia. It's cold and dark and the hipsters are waiting in line for the show to start next door. Half an hour later, Windy arrives with the chips and her dog as well as Eric Martin, who may or may not be the greatest writer of his disaffected generation. It's been a year since our last game. We're adults now, so we double the stakes. The buy-in is $20 and the ante a quarter, more money than we ever thought we could afford. Noticeably absent is Andy Miller, serving time for check fraud in South Carolina, surviving under the protection of his cellmate, a former gang leader and drug runner who goes by the name of Matilda. "You're going to have to take Andy's place," I tell Isaac. "What's that entail?" he asks. He's wearing a pea coat and a blue cap. He's from Boston, and, like Andy Miller, has a penchant for changing jobs and breaking the law. These days he works with children. "It means you're the bad guy." "I can do that," he says and promptly accuses me of cheating. Windy starts the deal. She looks like a queen, her new dress cut high, her dog, some form of abused Greyhound picked up from pet rescue, resting on a pillow near her feet. "I wouldn't mind being that dog," Isaac says. (Actually, I say it, but Isaac's the bad guy, so I'm putting words in his mouth. It's all very meta.) "Don't talk that way," Windy tells Isaac/me. Windy deals Hold'em, and I lose fast and early. She turns two ladies on the board and Eli battles Ben with trips and Ben loses, as he will all night. On Cooney's deal he calls Peach Grove. We're playing on a long table, behind a stationery store, in the offices where a literary journal is published. The lighting is poor. We have lots of beer and a cheap bottle of tequila resembling dish soap and Windy and Isaac take shots from the cap and soon Isaac is drunk and out of money and buying back in. In this way he is no Andy Miller, who played to win and could handle his alcohol and his intravenous drug use. On the other hand, Andy lives in a 4-by-8 cell, sleeps with his arms stretched forward, facing the wall, hums lonely tunes to himself outside for only an hour a day, circling the yard. Peach Grove is the game for most of the night. We play Iowa-style, mostly. Best hand takes a third of the pot, trips or better to go high, seven or less to go low, three suited connectors to pick up the grove. Ben wins twice, but always splits the pot. I get beat over and over again by Chris Cooney, who turns a straight to my trips, a flush to my straight, four of a kind to my full house. Losing to Cooney is like being smacked in the face repeatedly with an ear of corn or having your head dunked in a bucket full of ethanol or your cow tipped or your tractor ripped off. It sucks. "I don't shine shoes anymore," Chris Cooney says. Here's most of the rest of what you need to know: My girlfriend comes by twice. She's luminous in her thin white dress and black leather jacket. She kisses me and encourages me to win money so I can buy her something nice. When she leaves, the question is implicit in everyone's eyes: What's she doing with you? Around 9 o'clock Chris Thomas shows up, but he doesn't know what he's doing, which is fine with us. He runs a political organization; he's trying to save the world and suffers from extreme poverty. We're happy to take his money. There is a moment where Ben loses another hand of Hold'em and Eli gently touches his wrist. Another where Chris splits a winning hand with Isaac, just to be nice. And Windy, sitting there looking so pretty you wouldn't even notice when she squints knowingly, or that she wins nearly every hand she plays. Around 9:30, two strangers walk in and begin filming the game. "We're just playing poker," I say. "Don't talk to the camera," they reply. But the only truly important hand of the night comes during a game of Pineapple, a game we play only once and probably never again. I should mention, for the sake of journalistic integrity, I'm down $20 at this point. There are four cards down, nine in a square on the table. The cherry is wild—that is, the lowest red card. People forget that my girlfriend had a cherry pattern on her dress, so I am poised to win big. You can take any run of three to create the best five cards. You have to use two, and only two, from your hand. The max bet has been raised from 50 cents to a dollar. Cooney raises. I raise back. Eli follows suit. Ben folds. Eric plays, then folds. Windy folds. Cooney turns the center card, a king of clubs. Cooney bets. I raise. At least $30 sits benign on the table. It is the biggest take of the night. Cooney turns. Four kings. I turn. Straight flush, ace-high. Aka: THE NUTS. My hand is, to put it mildly, a quiet blazing wonder of 1,000 suns. I reach for the pot. "What's going on here?" Cooney says. He lives in the Richmond District. He is a long way from home. I moved to Bernal Heights. I will have to bicycle uphill. Isaac is drunk and asleep, snoring loudly into his folded arms. Eric has a baby. Ben has to get home before he is in trouble with his old lady. Eli is the only one who knows the combination to the alarm. I am the only one for whom the night is still young. I am wearing bike shoes. "What's it look like?" I reply, wrapping my forearms around my winnings, pulling them to me in a great glittering plastic pillow, tears pooling in my eyes. In this moment I love Chris Cooney as much as I have ever loved another man. He has broken my heart before and I'm sure he will again, but I am determined not to think about those things. What's important is that we are still together, except for Andy Miller, who is now a prison bitch. But we have Isaac, younger than all of us, injecting new blood. It is late, but it is also early. We've weathered the worst of it. We'll be playing poker still for a long time. Stephen Elliott - - - - December 10, 2005 The Euchre Report I just ran into Peter at the café. He could barely look at me. He was like, "Hey." I was like, "Hey." And th |